Pomp & Surkanstance

24 September 2015

Since the only way to share private YouTube videos with people you have specifically given permission to view them is with the individual URLs, I have created this web page to list all the family videos available to my family and friends.

13 February 2015

After 3 years of working at the cloud computing startup Uhuru Software I am happy to report that things are going amazingly well for me! True, these great things are taking place at another company (Amazon, no less) but good is good so why quibble over details?

Sadly, there just wasn't anything more for me to do helping develop the PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud business at Uhuru. Now I see that the Uhuru web site has been replaced with a simple page that has little product info or details and that most of my engineering colleagues have all wound up at HP (except for one who is working at still another firm).

I may not have gotten rich at Uhuru but I have no regrets. Just the opportunity to work with such an amazing group of people in a family type environment was wonderful. It was also a tremendous opportunity to expand my skills with cloud computing and virtualization as well as put my unorthodox marketing ideas to work. It was fun recruiting a huge membership for the Uhuru trial cloud service and social media communities with a shoestring budget.

And now the fun is just getting started for me at Amazon. After just 6 months of working as a Program Manager for a team building financial analytic systems for Amazon Retail I can already say that this is one of the BEST jobs I have ever had in my life! I never would have believed that a large company could be so nimble and still keep acting like a startup.

I had a lot of apprehension about working at Amazon before I started in September 2014. I'd heard all the stories about round-the-clock work and burn-out. The reality has been pleasantly surprising -- at least for the Retail Systems group where I am working (I can't really vouch for all the other areas of the company).

I never would have thought working on financial systems would be so interesting, and never wouldn't have applied for this job if a friend hadn't told me to. Now I can believe how exciting it is to build software that lets managers see how profitable it is to sell baby bathtubs in China, and understand exactly how consumer trends are changing every day. Data is fun!

My managers support initiative quite unlike most other firms I've worked at, and my engineer team-mates rarely work week-ends or late nights. It was a little disconcerting to see the lack of process we had in our engineering work, but I now think it is wonderful not to be bound by a lot of processes that may, or may not, be helpful. Our team can choose the tools, technologies and processes that we feel work best.

I had forgotten how great it can be having a job you just love while I spent 9 LONG years at Microsoft trying to work in a machine I wasn't built to fit in. My job at Amazon reminds me of the amazing days I spent back at PC Week Labs in the 1990s. Life is too short to just settle.

I feel so strongly about how great my team is that I am taking some of that initiative to try and recruit unconventional engineers to come and help build Financial Reporting and Analytics tools in Amazon Retail Systems. We are changing the way business is done by empowering business leaders to make decisions in record time with pertinent analytics.

Please give me a shout if you are interested in working at Amazon and have valid US work permits. My team is eagerly recruiting software engineers. Let me tell you all about how you can sell your soul to Amazon just like me.

14 July 2014

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Rob Reynolds, a senior software developer and creator of Chocolatey, explains how he uses a variety of different cloud computing solutions for hosting his applications. Amazon’s EC2 is great for streaming and AppHarbor is brilliant for integration with Git and easy hosting of apps. Azure was overpriced and difficult, but they have made a lot of improvements recently which Rob thinks might warrant a second look. Rob suggests that anyone trying to offer a cloud computing product should consider the freemum model. Offer some capabilities for free and charge for add-ons.

It was fascinating to hear Rob talk about his initiatives to create theChocolatey and Chuck Norris Open Source initiatives that are adding using capabilities to the Windows world. Who says Open Source is only about Linux?

15 November 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Mukesh Agarwal shares the secrets that have led him to be a master blogger, able to make an actual income of his sites. It turns out that the key to blogging success is simple: deliver what readers want. Mukesh explains how he has been able to constantly hone his blogs by watching which subjects attract the most interest and then focus on that. He is constantly creating new blogs targeted to subjects readers are most interested in. Of course, it helps to have useful content and a real interest in the topics you write about. Mukesh’s natural interest in VOIP has made blogging about methods to better use the internet for audio conversations a natural fit.

His web sites on the Uhuru service consistently outrank the thousands of other sites in traffic levels.

Mukesh has found the Uhuru service offers the kind of advanced features he is looking in running his sites but he has certainly felt the pain of some of the Uhuru service outages while it is in beta is eager to see it go into commercial operation. Even an hour of downtime a month is a big deal to Mukesh’s blogs that get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day.

13 August 2012

In this episode of the TPM podcast show Gennaro Marrazzo, a Technical Development Engineer, explains how the fragmentation of the Java platform is not a weakness, but actually one of its greatest strengths. There are flavours of Java available for everything from front-end UIs to real-time computing and mobile devices. Gennaro sees no clouds in Java’s future now that Oracle has acquired it. After all, it is in Oracle’s interest to keep Java as a vibrant development environment.

The emergence of new platforms like Python and Ruby may erode some of the niches where Java had previously flourished but Gennero believes that Java’s best days are still ahead.

03 August 2012

In this episode of the TPM podcast show Ryan Berry, an Application Development Manager, explains how the breadth of integration in Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE greatly simplifies the life of developers and increases productivity. When using Visual Studio Ryan can automatically file bugs, see notes from other developers, and even publish his apps to the cloud. Visual Studio features like Intellisense and XAML UI editing (new in VS 2012) take the pain out of getting things right the first time and reduce the amount of context switching developers have to go through when using lots of different tools.

Ryan is particularly happy to use Visual Studio 2012 with its closer integration with Team Foundation Server and Azure. He can easily manage his apps through the entire life-cycle, letting TFS publish his app for testing, integration with other developers and then to the Azure cloud. Ryan does point out that all this IDE automation comes at a cost. He tells about one company that ran into trouble building an app that used the .NET Entity Framework rich text field for storing pictures. The app choked under heavy load with lots of pictures loaded. The simplicity of the VS tools made it easy to walk into a problem like this, without understanding what was actually happening under the covers.

06 July 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Ming Lee, the manager of on-line operations at ESRI UK, talks about the tremendous benefits his company has seen in taking their Global Information Systems (GIS) software to the cloud. By moving to virtual machines on hosting services like Amazon Ming has reduced IT costs and increased capacity to handle large amounts of traffic and processing all at the same time. Ming can spin up new machines as fast as he wants, and take them down when no longer needed. Ming has looked as Platforms as a Service (PaaS) but found that the highly customized apps he supports won’t run well on them. However, new GIS apps are being written with the cloud in mind from the start (such as not relying on the OS for state) which will enable even more productivity improvements in the future.

20 June 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Pabich Pawel, a Senior Consultant at Readify, talks about his experiences helping companies in Australia bring their web applications to the cloud. Unfortunately, the dearth of local cloud computing services often means that Australian companies have to put up with barely tolerable latencies accessing off-shore clouds. The closest Azure hosting service is in Singapore. It also doesn’t help that many of the services Pabich’s customers want, like Microsoft’s MSMQ, aren’t even available on the cloud (just try and find MSMQ on Azure).

In other respects, migrating to the cloud is no different for Australian IT professionals than anyone else. Moving to virtualized environments on the cloud is always a good first step since you can easily move existing apps no matter how messy they are that way. As more and more apps are built to be cloud friendly the Platform as a Service offerings (PaaS) become more practical. Pabich likes using AppHarbor for his personal projects. The Git integration on AppHarbor is a big plu

10 June 2012

An effective student selection process is central to creating a great private school environment, but not sufficient. When the atmosphere or social dynamics of the student body deteriorate, it is easy to point fingers at admissions, blaming them for accepting unqualified students. While admissions can make mistakes, or even take unsuccessful gambles on marginal applicants, it is imperative to have a clear process for identifying students who don’t belong and counseling them out.

Many schools count exclusively on the admissions filtering to manage the student body, excepting extreme cases like felonies on campus. When, inevitably, a few students prove themselves a nefarious influence on the student body, they must be exit, both to eliminate their influence on others and to set a clear example that such behavior is not tolerated. A school must maintain clear academic and behavioral standards and apply them consistently.

Parents who send their children to private schools are not only paying for quality academics, but for a filtered environment where their children will be surrounded by quality students. The less effective the filtering, the less value there is in paying a premium over quality public alternatives.

The same principle applies to faculty. In spite of the fact that many private schools issue annual contracts to their faculty with no extended commitment, they hesitate to ask mediocre faculty not to return. Further, as pay is often based exclusively on a combination of seniority and education levels, there is little built-in incentive for faculty to maintain their vigor after they have established themselves. As long as they perform above the minimum requirements, they can focus their extra energies on their families and personal interests. This creates an environment of mediocrity.

The pass/fail assessment of faculty is in stark contrast with the graduated grading system used habitually for students. Honors ceremonies unite the entire student body to celebrate the students who make the dean’s list and who achieve great grades, but teachers are usually only celebrated for seniority or external accolades. That sends the signal that teachers are better off conserving their energy in order to last longer and thus move higher up the salary ladder.

The majority of students and faculty respond positively to effective incentives, raising the standards of the entire school. In a school employing such incentives, performance would improve such that few students and faculty would need to leave, and they would be motivated to constantly give their full efforts.

Identifying clear values and expectations and creating consistently enforced incentives to propagate those values among both faculty and students creates an environment of excellence. Quality admissions and hiring solve only part of the solution. Quality on-going incentives within the community keep it vigorous and healthy.

17 May 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Brian Byrne, the founder of MeshIP, tells about the benefits of running desktops in the cloud. For the same reasons that cloud computing makes sense for web servers, there are compelling reasons to run your personal productivity and desktop tools in the cloud as well. Brian’s company offers a VDI hosted solution which allows centralized management and backups. Running your desktop in the cloud might not be cheaper than buying a low cost PC for your desk, but when you add in the reliability improvements and IT management savings, the advantages of desktop hosting in the cloud are substantial.

15 May 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Troy Hunt, a software architect and Microsoft MVP for developer security, talks about his great experience using the AppHarbor Platform as a Service to host his .NET applications. He has looked at Microsoft’s Azure PaaS but found the requirements to rewrite his .NET apps to be prohibitive. Moreover, the AppHarbor integration with GitHub offers source control management that Troy hasn’t seen anywhere else.

The .NET PaaS takes away all the pain of having to manage servers. There is no going back to traditional hosting on virtual machines for Troy.

In our continuing series of SEP group Practical Software podcast interviews, Bishop Greg, an expert in Model Driven software projects at Inegranova, talks about how organizations building their own internal applications are increasingly finding themselves locked into particular vendors and technology stacks similar to the ‘80s and ‘90s when people were building applications on custom systems from companies like DEC and IBM. In Greg’s experience these lock-ins can be avoided by working at high level models which can be easily transposed onto varying underlying technology stacks without too much trouble. One example Greg gives is a customer of his who swiftly moved a custom app to support Web Sphere and DB2.

Maybe every organization has to bite the bullet and take a dependency on specific technologies at some point. For example, trying to build a cross-platform mobile app can sometimes wind up with software that is mediocre, not really taking advantage of any of the key features on individual mobile devices.

14 May 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Oren Eini, a software developer and avid blogger, tells about his passion of bringing NoSQL database technology to Windows that led him to become a major contributor to the Open Source RavenDB project. While the NoSQL database offerings on Linux are pioneering a lot of great ideas they are inflexible and extremely difficult to configure and use. RavenDB is different. Almost anyone can get RavenDB up and running quickly and it doesn’t require an immersion in esoteric configuration settings to tune.

Since RavenDB uses simple REST APIs it can be used by any applications, whether they are on Linux or Windows. RavenDB runs well on cloud infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services and is also available in a dedicated service.

10 May 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Peter Cohen, the founder ofSaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, explains how selecting the right technologies for a cloud service requires a good dose of business and marketing acumen to succeed. Picking the right technology or platform to build a cloud service is just one piece of the puzzle.

Peter has seen wanna-be internet businesses make all manner of rookie mistakes such as under spending on marketing (who knew) and selling on cost alone (you’re dead if your only differentiator is price). Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for success as a cloud service. Good marketing and pricing strategies will vary based on the specific business. Just make sure you are flexible and measure, measure, measure, results of everything you do.

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Brian Gracely, Director of solutions at EMC and host of the CloudCast podcast, reminisces on how cloud computing is filling the same role of empowering users as the PC and LANs did back in the ’80s and ’90s. With this phenomena of “shadow IT” developers and small departments are able to take advantage of cloud services and completely bypass traditional IT departments. All this empowerment does come with risks. Putting critical data on insecure cloud services with little traceability can come back to haunt you. There is still value in involving IT with cloud projects. Of course, forward thinking IT departments should show their users that they bring value to their cloud initiatives if they don’t want to see themselves shut out of even grass roots initiatives.

Brian also cautions that you shouldn’t expect cloud services to suddenly reduce bottom line costs. The cloud may offer unprecendented flexibility and start up velocity but they aren’t always as cheap as you think.

27 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast, Dekel Tankel, a Cloud Foundry marketing manager at VMware, explains how one of the things that interested him most about Cloud Foundry was it’s ability to cross the chasm between clouds, allowing customers to easily move their applications between cloud service providers. To Dekel Cloud Foundry is all about giving more choices to developers without locking people into a particular service or technology.

Developers can start with the Cloud Foundry micro-cloud as they build their app prototypes, running locally on a laptop, and then deploy to a cloud service when their code has matured. No other cloud service offers this degree of flexibility ranging from the private to public clouds.

At times the enthusiasm for Cloud Foundry is daunting to Dekel (they had 10,000 developers register in the first 72 hours of launch) and the volume of Open Source contributions is hard to keep up with. It would be easier to control and contain the progress of Cloud Foundry if it had been closed and followed a proprietary architecture, but it’s all been worth it.

25 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Michael Collier, an architect at Neudesic, shares his experiences in bringing .NET applications to the Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). Michael explains how migrating existing .NET apps to a PaaS is a process. Managers have to be educated about the cloud so they feel comfortable using it. He has often had to rewrite parts of the .NET apps to make them compatible with the Azure PaaS. The migration process is different for each app, depending on how it was built. .NET apps that follow best practices can run on a PaaS with almost no changes at all (e.g. not storing state on the server, etc). Other apps can be much more difficult to migrate (e.g. using COM, relying on server state, etc).

In the end, the migration to the cloud is well worth it. Developers can focus on what they love doing: writing great apps!

17 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Andy Piper, a Cloud Foundry developer advocate at VMware, talks about how to build great apps for the cloud. In his work with developers Andy has found that stateless apps are the easiest to transition to cloud platforms such as Cloud Foundry. Looking for particular files or settings on a server prevents your apps from being able to benefit from the automatic deployment scaling or redundancy features of new hosted Platforms of a Service. Luckily, many apps are ready to run on a PaaS already. At recent hackathons Andy has that many of the existing apps deployed on Cloud Foundry without any changes at all.

13 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Andrey Cherkasin tells about his decision to abandon a Platform as a Service and move to a custom hosting solution. Andrey was an early adopter of the Cloud Foundry PaaS technology, and was thrilled with being able to setup his own private PaaS. Unfortunately, Andrey’s needs for support of numerous Ruby platforms made it impractical for his needs. He now relies on a custom cloud solution using Chef Scripts and a smart OS.

12 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Jason Nappi, a software developer with SmartPak, talks about the journey he has been on to move his .NET application to the cloud. Everything is now running in virtualized instances that can be easily replicated to handle additional load, but the monolithic database model used by his software doesn’t lend itself well to most cloud platforms. It would be nice to utilize the scalability possible on Azure, but that just won’t be possible without re-architecting the database. Jason is closely watching technologies like database auto-sharding to find ways to further improve the performance of his apps in the cloud.

07 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Krum Bakalsky, a software engineer, shares his passion of participating in Open Source projects. In particular, VMware’s decision to place Cloud Foundry into Open Source has inspired Krum to become a significant contributor to the community effort. The Cloud Foundry community has been the perfect place for Krum to learn about the guts of building enterprise class software and to gain real experience as a participant. The fragmented nature of the Open Source world can be frustrating at times, such as when Krum discovered other programmers had already been working on something he was doing, but the collaborative environment more than makes up for these deficiencies.

04 April 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Dr Victor Fang, a research scientist with Riverain Technology, talks about how the medical industry is well on its path to moving IT to the cloud. While medical diagnostic images (like x-rays and MRIs) are still stored locally today, most companies are looking at ways of putting them in the cloud. It has just taken a while for cloud services to reach the level of security and privacy needed to comply with government regulations. At conferences Dr Fang has attended recently he has noticed the explosion in businesses offering cloud hosting, which is just one indicator of where the medical industry is moving. Dr Fang also couldn’t help but notice that hospitals where he’s worked are typically behind in adopting stateless web applications, relying primarily on traditional Windows-based client/server solutions that are harder to move to the cloud.

The health care industry can move slowly at times, but it makes huge waves when it does move, and the cloud is just around the corner.

30 March 2012

In this Uhuru podcast episode Jonathan Schnittger, a senior developer atiQuate, talks about even companies where cloud computing doesn’t make sense for their own products can still benefit from back-office cloud services like e-mail, file sharing, etc. Jonathan’s company creates security scanning software that has to be run on local networks which precludes cloud hosting. Many of his customers are using cloud services like Amazon. Even the large enterprises he works with are hosting more and more of their applications on the cloud. Desktop replacement with cloud services is another hot area Jonathan sees organizations adopting, but the solutions for this are still immature.

In this Uhuru podcast episode Wely Lau, a software architect at NCS Private Ltd, talks about his pioneering work with the Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). He was using Azure as an early tester even before it was released! There have been growing pains along the way, but today Wely is building complex applications on Azure that save his customers loads of money. He describes one fascinating project where he reduced the time to process thousands of records to prioritize work for a shipping company from over 4 hours to 2 minutes by dynamically spinning up additional application instances as needed. This is the dream of the cloud – pay for what you need, when you need it, rather than having large sunk costs in systems that are only used on a periodic basis. Wely is also closely following other PaaS services such as Amazon’s new Beanstalk, and now the Uhuru AppCloud (of course!).

28 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Imran Ahmad, President of Cloudanum, tells about his experience helping major organizations roll out cloud computing projects. The new Platform as a Service space solves a lot of the cloud management issues Imran’s customers face, but it takes a new skillset and way of thinking of the cloud. Many of Imran’s clients are exploring Platforms as a Service (PaaS) but not one has rolled out a production service yet. Too many PaaSes require changes in how apps are written to be immediately applicable to existing applications.

I will just have to get Imran to try to Uhuru PaaS to see how it IS possible for apps to be deployed on the cloud without re-architecting.

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Tim Genge, a senior software architect at RealmSoft, talks about his recent conversion to the cloud. Cloud computing used to be nothing more than marketing double-speak as far as Tim was concerned. Now that he is running his own business and working with customers in the banking sector he “gets” it. Yes, many aspects of the cloud are similar to traditional client/server software models but the way in which people use it to transform their businesses is truly impressive.

Tim has been looking seriously at Azure as a platform for his software, but he needs it to run on a private networks as well since his customers won’t trust everything to the public internet. Tim also has a client-side component to his software which makes it difficult to find the perfect cloud solution since no one seems to focus on that area.

As an addendum to the interview, I should point out that after the discussion we clarified that Azure does NOT, in fact, have a local version that Tim’s customers can run on their local networks. Tim says he is going to investigate the Uhuru PaaS as an alternative .NET PaaS (which just happens to run in private networks just fine).

27 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Feza Pamir, the VP of Marketing at QASymphony, explains how his company uses the cloud to offer their own cloud service, to help software test teams manage bugs and the entire quality assurance process. QASymphony currently uses Amazon virtual machines for hosting their service but support local deployments on private networks and are looking at other service providers that might have different levels of security that would allow them to meet varying customer needs.

Feza makes it clear that choice in cloud hosting is critical because his customers have such different needs – even private clouds have a role to play since there are still situations where organizations need to keep data on their own network.

While platforms as a service, like Uhuru, are an interesting hosting option to Feza the technology his company has built has such a degree of low-level customizations that they need the greater control of configuring the operating system to their needs. If he had to do it all over again it would be nice to build the QASymphony applications in a way that would make them more compatible with PaaSes.

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Anil Mahadev, a Principal Software Consultant aka DB2Hitman, shares his experience of working with the Uhuru PaaS. He was amazed with how quickly he was able to deploy a .NET app. Moreover, it was easy for him to configure his application to work with the Microsoft SQL Server service by following a few steps. By contrast, it took Anil a lot longer to get off the ground and running with Azure.

No question about it, Anil feels that the Uhuru PaaS is great for developers and test engineers. The big question is whether IT is ready to go the way of the PaaS.

25 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Terry Montgomery, a Project Manager at Health Roster, talks about his experience with managing IT projects in the cloud. According to Terry, the medical industry may be slow to adopt new technologies but the value of cloud computing is so compelling that they are moving fast. Amazingly, it is the small operations like physician offices which are leading in cloud adoption with products like practice fusion. Hospitals and large health-care organizations are dipping their toes into cloud computing with virtualization of their private data centers. Compliance issues, and HIPPA, may have created some initial caution with cloud adoption in health-care, but Terry sees that these issues are being addressed and that the industry is ripe for the cloud now.

22 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show, Shalin Jirawla (a software engineering student) shares his thoughts about cloud computing. He talks about his interest in using the cloud for real-time computing applications. While Platforms as a Service are interesting to Shalin he feels that complete access to virtual machines is necessary for most of the things he wants to do for now. His experiments with Microsoft’s Azure haven’t been overwhelming.

That’s the kind of challenge Uhuru loves! Let’s just see if the Uhuru PaaS can’t help Shalin with his work…

21 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Ben Yehooda (the CEO ofLevaman) talks about how his company is building cloud services to make the virtual office of the future a reality today. Just as the cloud has made it possible for companies to avoid having to build their own physical IT infrastructure, Ben is working hard to eliminate the need for physical infrastructure too.

Why can’t employees just work together remotely from wherever they are? Why invest in expensive office space? Ben explains why he thinks tools like Skype and Office 365 are limited in their abilities to re-create the vibrant office environments with serendipitous conversations and sharing of information.

Levaman practices what they preach. Their employees are scattered around the world and they have never owned a physical server.

You can hear ben talk about his vision of the cloud and virtual offices here:

13 March 2012

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Dave McCrory and Patrick Chanezon, both senior staff at VMware, explain how the decision to introduce the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) as an Open Source project has helped far more than its hurt. Dave and Patrick talk about how they had the first community bug fix pull requests within the first day of releasing Cloud Foundry to the Open Source community. After a year in the Open Source realm they feel Cloud Foundry has matured far quicker than it ever could have otherwise.

There is a certain logic here. For a technology like a PaaS aimed squarely at developers, sharing the source code and engaging the very people intended to use the service can lead to a lot of great benefits.

Still, it can be a little frightening to see the community take your life’s labours in directions you may not have intended, or dreamed, as the example Dave and Patrick site of Smalltalk support being added to Cloud Foundry illustrates, not to mention .NET support and other sundry enhancements that companies like Uhuru have added.

In this Practical Software show, SEP group member Venkatesh Potdar, a Project Manager at Adtran, talks about how important it is to build a partnership with outsourcing teams. He points out that you can’t just throw things over the wall and expect success. This kind of collaboration requires trust and respect and simply won’t work with a gun to the head mentality, treating the outsource team like laborers to whom you can just issue demands.

Venkatesh also explains why it is sometimes better to just go the whole way to actually set up a permanent office abroad to hire your off-shore team as direct employees. If you are going to be making a long term commitment to a team that is sufficiently large anyway, then why not just bring them on as actual members of your company?

12 February 2012

Teachers often commiserate with one another over how little of their lessons are actually retained by the students. The standard defense is that the material was taught, but that students are too fickle to remember or at least admit to have remembered it. Teaching cycles often look something like this: assign reading, complete worksheet, discuss in class, distribute study guide, review, test, repeat. Perhaps most perplexing of all is the fact that students often perform well on assessments and then promptly seem to forget what they learned.

The problem lies partially in our natural tendency to forget some of what we learn, but perhaps more importantly in the difference between teaching and learning. Most lessons are not meaningful to the students, leading them to focus on isolating what they need to memorize to maximize their grade and then moving on. In short, the teachers teach what they think is important for students to know and the students, finding the material largely irrelevant, develop short-term cramming skills to perform well on the predictable assessments and then promptly forget the material.

As written tests are the most common way of verifying what students learned, teachers can point to strong test results and claim that they successfully taught the material, exonerating themselves from any subsequent student “forgetfulness.” From the student’s perspective, it becomes increasingly tempting to adopt an attitude of cynicism toward the boring, meaningless process. Inasmuch as students find their classes irrelevant, school becomes a mind-numbing process of going through the motions in order to get a grade. Copying worksheet answers, cheating on tests or gaming the system appear increasingly legitimate if the process is pointless to start with.

Modern teaching techniques, often involving group work, differentiated instruction and technology, attempt to address this divide between teaching and learning by making education more interactive, and thus more engaging. Given that students are bombarded with stimuli from various electronic sources and socializing all day long, the theory is that schools have to compete for their attention by using similar techniques. Unfortunately, such theories reduce students to animals whose attention can only be secured by flashy graphics on screens and social interaction. Intellectual engagement largely ignored, and the academic engagement resulting from these "21st Century Methods" continues to fare poorly against "19th Century Methods."

Ultimately, successful student engagement involves respecting the students as individuals and as thinkers. It requires the teacher to create an environment where students discover how the world works experientially, and appreciate the relevance of what they are studying. The definition of a master teacher is whether he can create such a learning environment. It can be done with or without modern technology; the more technology is used, the more additional skill the teacher requires to ensure that the technology contributes to rather than distracts from the focus of the learning.

There are some tangible steps which teachers can take to ensure that learning is happening. First, never waste the students' time and intelligence. Start classes on time, dispense with busywork assignments like crossword puzzles and mindless worksheets. Beware of excessive use of workbooks and mindless assignments like coloring maps.

Second, encourage integration of new concepts into existing knowledge. Start with what students know and create scenarios where students have to discover concepts by actively solving real problems rather than by passively listening to lectures or viewing media. A textbook example of this is Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise. It is difficult to imagine a more effective way to teach the concept of racism.

Third, find innovative assessment methods that allow students to apply their ingenuity and understanding to new problems, without creating the free-rider incentives endemic to most group projects. Factual regurgitation should never be the center of assessment. Instead, have them apply what they learned in meaningful ways, like these simulated WWII letters to investigate the plight of the Japanese both in Japan and in the USA. Beyond assessing understanding, assessments can also help students to develop presentation skills appropriate to their chosen medium. Perhaps the most misunderstood medium is PowerPoint, which few teachers know how to effectively use themselves.

Finally, listen to the students by checking in regularly, both through formal surveys and informal discussion. Students are usually honest, sometimes to a fault, about how things are going. By including their feedback in the directions of the class, they are respected and validated as individuals. In a balanced class, they inevitably teach the teacher as much as they learn from him.

15 January 2012

I am a Middle School History teacher of 9 years and still love my profession. When I started teaching, I had a dream of creating the ideal curriculum and then simply propagating it around the world to overhaul education. My first few years teaching were in a private school which tried to do exactly this. Although the educational level was much higher than public schools, I became imminently aware that the core of quality education is not having the best curriculum, but having the best teachers. Curriculum is decidedly easier to replicate than great teachers.

I still do not understand how any teacher or parent (and I am both) who understands that the most important factor in education is the teacher in the classroom would ever seek centralized solutions, as such solutions can never ensure that each classroom has a great teacher in it who is empowered to make the best decisions for his classroom. Political solutions, by definition, are centralized solutions to a localized problem. It does not matter whether the centralized solutions come from government or teachers unions, they cannot ensure quality in each local classroom.

The only viable solution, in my opinion, places the control of the classroom firmly in the teacher's hands. It is the New Zealand solution of some years back: localize the funding and the decisions in each school in the hands of the parents/teachers. In other words, the principal and teachers of each school should be solely answerable to the parents of their students, with no tenure.

This could be achieved through the complete privatization of education, but that would be unpopular. It can also be achieved by school choice whereby each school receives a certain amount per student who attends and then parents can vote with their feet if they are unhappy. Unfortunately, this option is unpopular with teachers, who often don't trust parents to make sound educational choices. From my experience, parents VERY consistently request for their child to be in the classes of the most competent teachers. The other common problem with vouchers and school choice is that the governments start attaching curricular and testing requirements to the funding, invalidating the purpose of local decision-making.

Politicians will never favor the privatization or localization of education because that would remove it from their influence. They want to find central solutions to all of our problems, whereby they are the heroes who save us and are subsequently rewarded by re-election. Their "solutions" generally involve centralizing decisions even more, which is always detrimental to education.

I have travelled all over the world observing great teachers, both public and private. In spite of the problems with our current system, I have observed public, inner city, American school teachers like Rafe Esquith, who manage to minimize the negative impacts of standardized testing and poor curricula on their activities in the classroom. His 5th grade students' scores on standardized tests are high because his students are learning what they ought to in his own self-designed curriculum, not because he focuses centrally on testing.

Finally, I find that the "Finland Phenomenon" is possible in each classroom without fixing the entire educational system. Yes, there are horrible schools where teachers may be restricted from the freedom of achieving this in their classroom, but quality teachers should not stay in such schools. I have decided to create a "Finland Phenomenon" in my classroom and am impressed by how much control I have to independently make a difference and motivate students by creating the right environment.

Let us lobby for localization of educational decision-making while doing our best to create our ideal learning environment in our own classroom.

09 December 2011

In this Practical Software show, SEP group member Frank Vogelezang, Manager Pricing Office at Ordina, explains how contracts are the key to successful outsourcing. If you don’t define what is being measured for success, or what the expectations are, then you are only asking for trouble with misunderstandings. Where one person might determine an “incident” to be changing a password another might not.

Contracts can also be terrific places to create incentives to deliver great quality or beat schedules, by offering bonuses and other inducements. For example, in maintenance agreements it can be a great idea to pay bonuses for smaller number of over-all incidents rather than pay on a per-incident basis. If developers are getting paid for fewer hours worked, it is in their interests to build things right the first time and to take steps to reduce the number of support issues that could arise.

30 November 2011

In this Practical Software show, SEP group member Mike Anthony, Co-Founder & Advisor at IQity Solutions, explains how his first attempts at outsourcing failed. Attempts to find off-shore teams to handle all of his development needs led only to disappointment. However, in the end Mike has made outsourcing work by adopting a distributed model, which requires keeping core engineering talent locally. Having a local team makes it easier to have customer interactions and avoid issues with giving over critical intellectual property to third parties.

Mike keeps communication problems are kept at a minimum through the use of daily scrum sessions with both local and off-shore engineers. Short release cycles of 2 weeks make it easy to make sure things stay in alignment.

25 November 2011

In this Practical Software show, SEP group member Keith Laidlaw, the CTO with GamingVC, explains how the most successful off-shoring projects he’s worked on involve products with well-defined requirements that are fairly static. Products which are dynamic, with constantly shifting requirements are difficult to manage with off-shore teams. Keith also explains how there are different types of off-shoring work-models which work better for varying development models. In one cases Keith brought the entire off-shore team on-shore for the duration of the project.

Unfortunately, Keith talks about how the whole outsourcing is changing as the costs rise. He is seeing some quotes for projects that are the same as hiring staff domestically. This has implications for the future of off-shoring altogether.

24 November 2011

In this Practical Software show, SEP group member Marten van der Tempel, a consulting partner with 4ton, shares the secrets he has devised to lead successful software outsourcing projects. It all starts with and objective and in-depth specifications, according to Marten, followed by a deep understanding of the customer. It not good enough to just know that you are writing software for accounts, but it is also critical to know WHY accountants need this software.

When it comes to specifications, being specific and detailed is important if you want a successful outsourcing experience. Marten also explains how visualizations or wire-frames, of exactly what the user interface should look like are even more useful than text specifications. Communication with people who may not speak your native language is hard enough and distance only makes things worse. Use as many screen mock-ups, wire-frames, and visualizations as you can. The worst thing you can do on any software project is to start writing code before the goals, end-users, and specifications are fully understood.